God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (31 page)

Some raids, though, were truly terrifying. Around February 1574, in Common School Lane, York, men raged through the house of the recusant doctor Thomas Vavasour

with naked swords and daggers, thrusting and porring [prodding] in at every hole and crevice, breaking down walls, rending down cloths, pulling up boards from the floors, and making such spoil of their goods in such cruel manner that the gentlewoman his wife … thereupon lost her wit.
²⁹

Despite their best efforts, the pursuivants failed to discover Vavasour’s ‘politicly devised’ hide. This was England’s earliest recorded priest-hole, though the vast majority were constructed after the 1586 Hurleyford conference, when it was decided that certain households should become proper missionary posts. Before that time, most priests had been itinerant and too many had been stopped in their tracks. Of the three hundred-odd priests who had returned to England between 1574 and 1586, thirty-three had been executed, over sixty had gone into exile, around fifty were in prison and a few had died naturally.
³⁰
By the 1590s, their chances of survival had improved,
thanks in no small part to the masons and joiners who put their skills to the use of the mission. Chief of their number was Nicholas ‘Little John’ Owen, a young carpenter from Oxford who presented himself to Garnet around the time that the Vaux sisters removed to Warwickshire. Together they strived to keep Garnet – and the Jesuit mission – alive.

Examples of Owen’s handiwork survive, some so well hidden that they have only been found by accident. In 1894, a boy exploring a derelict part of Harvington Hall in Worcestershire chanced upon a loose brick that exposed a tiny room, eight feet long, three feet wide and five feet high. Its entrance, past a swinging beam at the back of a panelled cupboard, had not been tried for almost three hundred years (see
Plate 26
). The uninformed observer, looking at a wall or fireplace or staircase, might never suspect an Owen-built hide in the vicinity, but know where to look, lift the right step, tread on a particular tile and his genius is revealed. Owen understood buildings intimately. He worked with them, using their features, exploiting every angle and space. He had to operate quickly and quietly, keeping his plans in his head. He never grew lazy; each priest-hole was different. He was generous with his advice, giving tips ‘for the making of others’, and he was discreet – he never gave up his hides, even under torture. He was Garnet’s man and lodged with the sisters, but was often on secondment, chiselling away in ‘the chiefest Catholic houses’ in the land. His talent seems only to have been matched by his industry. ‘He was so skilful,’ wrote John Gerard, S.J., ‘both to devise and frame the [hides] in the best manner, and his help therein desired in so many places, that I verily think no man can be said to have done more good of all those that laboured in the English vineyard.’
³¹
He must have infuriated his adversaries.

One justice of the peace, characterised in a play performed at the English College in Rome, was said to have

brought in engineers by art,

With mathematic and instruments to sound

The depth, the breadth, and length of ev’ry room,

To see what close conveyance may be found,

Or secret place that might conceal a priest.
³²

Others took less care, hacking, ripping, smashing and stripping until the house was unrecognisable. In an attempt to brazen out a raid on Garnet’s cottage in Finsbury Fields
^fn11
around 1591, the caretaker, Hugh Sheldon, offered to provide the pursuivants with an axe, so they could ‘break open, pull down, knock holes through or cut to pieces anything whatever’.
³³

Not all homes benefited from the expertise of an Owen or a Greene, who reportedly made ‘all the secret places’ in Derbyshire.
³⁴
Dorothy Lawson ill-advisedly used her oven; the Lygons of Elkstone hid stuff in the loo.
³⁵
Priests inevitably were caught and had to think quickly. Disguises helped, as did pseudonyms and cover stories. But could they lie? If directly asked about their priesthood, could they deny it? No, said some clerics, this was ‘tantamount to denying Christ’ and would always be a mortal sin. Others posited that when truth and justice were at odds – for example, when priests were unlawfully declared traitors – they were not obliged to incriminate themselves or, indeed, their harbourers. The burden of proof lay with the accuser and the priest could do ‘anything he can – using equivocation, silence, returning the question, or any method he likes – to avoid making a reply, as long as he neither denies his faith nor lies’. This was the resolution of a casuist text produced under the supervision of William Allen and Robert Persons in the early 1580s. The two clerics endorsed the resolution with the more pithy: ‘He may delude.’
³⁶

Just how far a Catholic could delude his examiner was a matter of discretion and some controversy. The practice of ‘mental reservation’, by which a respondent kept in his head a statement that contradicted or qualified the answer he had just given, could be taken to faintly absurd lengths. When, for example, Thomas Cornford was captured saying Mass for the imprisoned Eliza Vaux in 1612, he told the Archbishop of Canterbury that he was John Underwood, a married father of six who had visited Eliza in the hope of renting a farm on her son’s
estate. At his second examination, however, he admitted that he was a Jesuit priest:

Whereas he affirmed himself to be a married man, his meaning was that his wife was his breviary and that he had been married unto it twelve years. As for his children … those were his ghostly and spiritual children … The reason why he called himself a farmer was because he was so to God, according to that text,
Redde rationem villicationis tuae
:
Give an account of thy farmership
. And the reason why he said that he went to Mistress Vaux to take a farm of the Lord Vaux was because he was ready to do them any service for their salvation and for the spiritual tilling of their souls. Whereas he had denied himself to have been beyond the seas, his answer was that he spoke that with intention that he had been there, but not that he was bound to tell His Grace so much.
³⁷

For many people, this was lying by any other name and it showed that whatever the armchair casuists might prescribe from the security of exile, equivocation was a tricky doctrine to apply – and justify – on the ground. Priests were roundly condemned for the practice, especially the Jesuits with whom it came to be closely identified.
^fn12
The 29-year-old gentlewoman Anne Bellamy, who would betray the whereabouts of Robert Southwell in 1592, claimed at his trial that he had coached her to deny having seen a priest, keeping the true meaning in her head that she had not seen one with the intention of traducing him.

In 1598, Garnet would enter the fray with
A treatise against lying and fraudulent dissimulation
, in which he defended Southwell and the use of equivocation ‘both to heretics and also to diverse Catholics’, who think it ‘seemeth strange’. According to the Protestant polemicist Richard Sheldon, Cornford had been a ‘doltish’ simpleton before Garnet had received him into the Society of Jesus. ‘Well it may be observed herehence,’ he surmised, ‘how efficacious the Garnetian Academy hath been for training youth in lying, cogging and equivocating.’
³⁸

This was presumably the sort of ‘evil instruction’ that Sheriff Cave
of Leicestershire had feared – youths studying ‘equivocating tricks’ alongside their (equally harmful) catechism, servants drilled to deal with raids, girls sewing vestments, boys gathering relics, children learning to read and write in invisible ink
^fn13
and being exhorted ‘from the very beginning to protect religion and the holy Church’; households turning inwards, celebrating different holidays and heroes from the rest of the country, shunning Protestants (‘since they are more grievous enemies of Christ and much more to be hated’ than ‘Jews or Turks’): the very bonds of society being broken by the pernicious influence of the recusant mistress. ‘If only there was some one place where they might be permitted to live in peace,’ Garnet opined, ‘they would consider themselves treated fairly enough.’
³⁹
But the authorities had no truck with this line, especially as regards the Vaux sisters, who were hardly retreating into a quiet seigneurial existence.

Alongside Eleanor’s children, the sisters raised and educated other youths, including William Hutchinson, the fourteen-year-old cited by Cave in 1588, who was listed as a recusant thirty-five years later.
⁴⁰
There was also their little cousin Frances Burroughs, whom Eleanor had adopted around 1581 when the five-year-old lost her mother (Lord Vaux’s sister Maud). According to the Chronicle of St Monica’s, the convent in Louvain that Frances would join:

When this child came first to the said widow, she took her in her arms with tears and said ‘I will have Frances, I will have Frances’, having before intended to have taken another of the sisters who was her goddaughter. ‘For to this child,’ quoth she, ‘God will give a blessing which none of the rest shall have.’ Which proved true, for she became a religious [i.e. a nun] and none of the rest so much as Catholic.
⁴¹

Family legend had it that Frances had been destined for God’s graces since infancy, for every Sunday when her (conformist) father took the family to church, she had fallen into a deep slumber,

not waking till she was out of the church again, and this continued with her after she could go alone, and was so observed in her that they thought it bootless to lead her into the church, but would leave her in the churchyard to play during the time of service.

Eleanor would have enjoyed, and presumably had a hand in, that tale, it being just the kind of conformity-bashing story that the missioners encouraged. At least baby Frances only fell asleep. The moment Francis Woodhouse entered his parish church in Norfolk, he felt a fire in his bowels that not even eight pints at the local tavern could quench. The message was clear: since England’s churches were ‘polluted’ with heresy, God disapproved of attendance.
⁴²

Although Frances Burroughs was ‘sickly all her life long’, she had a mischievous, indomitable spirit. Once, when an alms-seeker came to the house, she sneaked him a slice of pie when the butler, who had already provided ‘a good piece of bread and meat’, disappeared to fetch some beer. During searches, she was ‘always let out to go up and down to answer the officers, because her courage was such as she never seemed to be daunted or feared of anything’. On one occasion, a pursuivant, ‘holding his naked dagger at her breast’, threatened to stab her in the heart if she would not tell him where the priests were hiding. ‘If you do,’ she cried, ‘it shall be the hottest blood that ever thou sheddest in thy life.’ The pursuivant was so taken by Frances’s courage that he tried to buy her for a hundred pounds.

The chronicler of St Monica’s was less impressed. Although she praised Frances’s patience, humility and obedience, she was clearly needled, even after Frances’s death, by her ‘hasty words’ and ‘some small defects’ in her character, ‘which,’ the writer suggested with superb disdain, ‘perhaps were not so displeasing to God as to creatures’. Her last words on Frances were that she had ‘but a weak voice for the choir’, a mortifying shortcoming for a nun.

Frances joined the Canonesses Regular of the Lateran at Louvain around 1595, when she was about nineteen. Her escape from England was arranged by Garnet. His servant Richard Fulwood
favoured the route from Gravesend to Gravelines, later uncovered by a spy:

The priests of the country command such youths as they make choice of unto him [Fulwood], who placeth them in some blind alley near the water until the wind serves for passage, which fitting, the vessel (which is some old hoy or suchlike, to avoid suspicion) goeth down empty towards Gravesend, and he provideth a pair of oars and boats, the passengers and carriage, and so ships them into the bark, commonly beyond Greenwich, and conveys the money which belongs unto them afterwards himself. They ship them to Gravelines or Calais and take forty shillings for the passage.
⁴³

A passing reference in 1598 to ‘the safe shipping of her maidservant’ confirms that Eleanor sent others abroad too. It was not a decision that was taken lightly. Border guards were on the lookout for the ‘crafty Catholic children abroad in every quarter or coast in England’. Garnet deemed the services of agents like Fulwood, though ‘unbelievably burdensome and fraught with infinite perils and anxieties’, to be ‘the most necessary and useful works we undertake’.
⁴⁴
Although quite a few of the boys who made it out to the colleges and seminaries abroad would return home, most of the girls entering the convents did not expect to see their country again.
^fn14
Frances would die in
Flanders in 1637. As a child in Eleanor’s house, she had agonised over her vocation for ten years, searching for a sign and ‘wavering in her mind, sometimes she would be a nun, sometimes not’. She was encouraged by ‘daily’ conversation with priests, and by Eleanor, who told her inspiring tales about her sister Elizabeth’s life with the Poor Clares in Rouen.